Comics and Graphic Narrative

In my previous post I had used the phrase "the tyranny of words" to describe how, even in a visual-centric medium such as comics, we as readers can tend to pay more attention (or even complete attention) to the words used in a comic or graphic narrative than to the images used to convey the story. Sometimes, those who create comics can also fall in love with their words, and consequently create a strip that's, well, not very good. Yesterday, I came across this strip that I think demonstrates well how NOT to compose a comic strip. This is from a long-time strip called Funky Winkerbean , a strip that has been around for almost 50 years. (My criticism for this strip is strictly for this particular strip, and not the entire history of the strip.)   We can tell by the configuration of the word balloons that what's being represented is four or five separate pieces of dialogue, which means what we have here is something that could be rendered as a 4- or 5-panel st...